Camouflaging Your Perl Code

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Camouflaging Your Perl Code

• Dan Magnuszewski
• Buffalo Perl Mongers
• May 16th, 2006

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Steganography

• is the art and science of writing hidden
  messages in such a way that no one apart from the
  intended recipient knows of the existence of the
  message

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Steganography

• The word "Steganography" is of Greek origin and
  means covered, or hidden writing
• Demeratus sent a warning about a forthcoming
  attack to Greece by writing it on a wooden panel
  and covering it in wax

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Steganography

• Generally, a steganographic message will appear
  to be something else a picture, an article, a
  shopping list, or some other message.

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Steganography

• Steganographic messages are often first encrypted
  by some traditional means, and then a covertext
  is modified in some way to contain the encrypted
  message, resulting in stegotext.

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Steganography

• The advantage of steganography over
  cryptography alone is that messages do not
  attract attention to themselves, to messengers,
  or to recipients. An unhidden coded message, no
  matter how unbreakable it is, will arouse
  suspicion and may in itself be incriminating, as
  in some countries encryption is illegal.

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Steganography With Perl

• Many different ways to do it - of course, its
  Perl -)
• A good method to use
• Make the Perl code invisible
• Hide it
• Decode it

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Make The Code Disappear

• Sounds like I need a magic module
• But I dont. Theres a very clean solution to
  this problem
• AcmeBleach

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AcmeBleach

• By Damian Conway
• The first time you run a program under use
  AcmeBleach, the module removes all the
  unsightly printable characters from your source
  file. The code continues to work exactly as it
  did before, but now it only contains one line of
  text use AcmeBleach

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Hide The Code

• One way to do this is to alternate lines of
  invisible code with text
• Remove the remaining text
• use AcmeBleach

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Decode It

• Strip out all text
• Create a new file and put the invisible code into
  it.
• Execute the file and grab the output.
• Remove all evidence (the file)

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Time For An Example
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Questions?!
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The End